Raised in the industrial heartland of Cleveland, Ohio, I received my Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing from Ohio State University in 1993, and moved to Eugene, Oregon, in 1994, where I have lived for the last 32 years. Photography allows me to converse with and about the world, especially its darker aspects. To paraphrase Tom Waits, I like beautiful images telling me terrible things. I am a self-taught photographer. I had flirted with the medium during my time in art school, but never utilized it as my primary practice. It was not until the untimely death of one of my closest friends in 2014, who was a photographer and instructor of photographic history at a university in Cleveland, that I began to take my practice seriously. Photography became a way to honor her memory and her belief in me as an artist. I have found that the deeper I go into my practice, the more I feel like my true self; the camera acting as a third eye that grants me vision and gives my life clarity of purpose.